Thursday, July 13, 2017

One Last Pick Thru the Bins, Volume 32: Flying Lotus, On Personal Problems and Appreciation

OK...but is he wearing pants? And what does that mean?!

Did bullet points in the last volume, and that feels like a
fail. Still, made some good choices, too, so those are incorporated herein.

How’d I Find It?

I really thought that Flying Lotus connected cleanly with the
Odd Future collective. Then again, I didn’t name him in my (let’s face it,
weird) write-up, so brain-farts abound. He has, however, worked with Hodgy
Beats and Earl Sweatshirt, at least.

Gateway Drug/Album

I have no idea how I picked up Cosmogramma; I only know I
have it. Listened to it back when, too, and remembered liking it. By which I
mean, I was happy when I saw Flying Lotus next in the queue. I couldn’t quite
remember what it sounded like, at least not beyond recalling it as
instrumental-heavy…

Notes/Tracks (and No Bullet Points)

…and that matters, because I always struggle with
instrumentals. With the way my brain snaps to lyrics, listening to music
without words bears a rough resemblance to contemplating an unfinished painting;
yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely a personal limitation, but whenever I hear music
without lyrics, I can’t help but pat my pockets for one of those audio doo-dads
they give you at museums to explain the history and meanings of the damn
paintings. (And, as with paintings/sculptures/all visual media…just look at the damn thing, ya lazy twit; something’ll reveal itself*.)

(* Also, I have improve, lo, these past 10-15 years.)

In a bid to contain the sprawl, I confined my close
listening to just two of Flying Lotus’ albums, Cosmogramma (2010) and You’re
Dead (2014, non-Deluxe), but with one detour back to his debut album, Los Angeles
(2008). A couple tracks (well, names, actually; “Beginner’s Falafel,” “Comet Course” (for once, read the comments) and “Roberta Flack”) stood out on that one, but focus requires focus,
so those got short shrift…that said, in a moment that reveals the persistence
of my need for lyrics, my ears pricked up on “Roberta Flack” and just because
someone said something. (Sweet, sweet relief.)

There’s one other thing to point out: the only other time
this series put any real time into an “instrumental artist” was the Quasimoto/Madlib volume – e.g., way back at Volume 13. Fond memories of Madlib suggested he’d
make for a decent measuring stick against Flying Lotus. That experiment
backfired a bit…spent a wee bit too much time, in fact, on Madlib.

Back to Flying Lotus, it feels like the best frame to hang
up around him starts with words like “atmospheric,” “layered,” and “probably nicely
stoned.” Even as he’s not so different from Madlib (they even collaborated at
least once), in that he uses a lot of jazz elements, Flying Lotus seems to borrow/employ
more electronica, EDM (? – yeah, last one’s a stretch; learning, bear with me).
And that parenthetical question mark feels even more relevant given that whatever
dancing one can do the Flying Lotus would, by necessity, involve vast amounts
of spontaneous, uh, astral channeling (see, “Tesla,” both for jazz elements and
elaborations with rhythm).

Flying Lotus ranges wider, too: a couple personal favorites
borrow video game sounds (or video-game-esque), most obviously in “Dead Man’s Tetris” and the opening to “Clock Catcher” (also, watch video and see below about certain settings/chemical reactions); his cleverest borrowing, however,
comes with “Table Tennis,” which, unless he tricked my ears, uses an actual
ping-pong ball for audio effect. Those are quirks, though; if there’s a
unifying effect to it all, I’m sticking with jazz/electronica.

As for tempo, a couple stray outliers aside – say, the “Cold Dead” and “Fkn Dead” combo from You’re Dead, which pulls in more rock elements
than usual (guitar) – he generally keeps a mellow mood (and neither songs strays
so far). More to the point, Flying Lotus’ music has a natural tendency to sort
of seep a one layer into the background – by which I mean, he forges forward
without one of the central benefits of lyrics, e.g., a voice repeatedly
commanding your immediate, present attention. For all that, I can see certain settings
and/or obvious chemical reactions where one would very comfortable sink into
that same background layer, and merge into that auditory space.

I do a lot of my listening at work (and thank all the known
gods for that), which means I’m listening with an exciting array of
distractions. In that sense, Madlib had a built-in advantage, in that most of
his tracks that I listened to included the centering, siren sound of (most
often, rapping) voices. Bad Neighborhood Instrumentals, which I only tried out
today, leveled the playing field a bit, but even that presented a distraction
to the primary mission. To be clear, comparison wasn’t the intent. It just
became impossible to avoid.

It’s here where things get interesting, or at least
generational. Madlib’s a big stretch closer to my age than Flying Lotus, and that
raises pointed questions about comparative contemporary zeitgeists – i.e., the
extent to which musical taste grows from how one’s ears are trained by what
they heard while growing up. In so many words, Madlib’s samples and arrangements
play more musically/melodically, whereas Flying Lotus’ present more as sound/impression.
And the question I get hung up on is whether the appeal with the former isn’t a
function of the three years of life that separate me from Madlib (OK, Otis Jackson, Jr.), versus the 12 years that separate me from Flying Lotus (Steve
Ellison). Basically, I don’t want to knock Mr. Lotus (can I call him Flying?)
as being a lesser artist based on nothing more than personal taste – something that
goes double if it’s based on nothing more than the particular stretch of time and
space in which each of us walked the earth.

The fact that I haven’t talked more about individual tracks
in this post comes from a place of diffusion rather than disrespect. A playlist
will accompany this post, as always, and I rate each song I chose. If I bounce
around the two albums I listened to, I could pick several that feel like the
center of Flying Lotus’ sound – and the bubbling beats of “Galaxy In Janaki”
works as well as anything (again, video/chemical reactions; also...okay). Still, I would appreciate it, and sincerely, if
people from closer to my age (46) listened to, say, Flying Lotus’ You’re Dead
and then Madlib’s roughly contemporaneous Rock Conducta (either volume), while
someone younger (say, closer to Flying Lotus’ 33) did the same. I’d love
comments/votes as to what listens easiest, and with theories (elaborate, or
otherwise) as to why.

I want to close this volume with one note. I spent this
afternoon going back and forth between Madlib and Flying Lotus trying to
isolate what actually separated one artist from the other. My last guess was a simpler,
more traditional rhythmic scheme – something I thought I got from Madlib, but not
so much from Flying Lotus. A song like “German Haircut” confirms it (tres jazz),
but that theory really lasted only as long as checking back in on a couple
favorite tracks – e.g., “Never Catch Me” (ft. srsly famous dude), “Dead Man’s
Tetris,” or even older tracks like “Nose Art.”

I just spent the last half hour (not kidding) trying to find
one track I heard today, one where the rhythm looked like it would follow a
super-traditional hip-hop dominant beat - two bass “throbs,” basically – that I
thought would continue through the rest of the song. Instead Flying Lotus
followed those two “throbs” with a bpm-crazy drumming runs. I can’t find the
damn thing and, frankly, I’m losing my mind over this, so…hold on, found it!! “ComputerFace//Pure Being!” I’m talking about the break right before the 2:00 mark. I
thought, if only for a second (and in spite of everything I’d heard all day),
that he’d settle into that simpler beast. Nope, he went with the runs…which
just came out wrong…

After all the comparisons above, I think I want to end on a
note of respect: Flying Lotus is everything but simple and easy. And, as with a
lot of guys cut from the same cloth, my appreciation for what he does grows
with each listen.